by Mary Glucksman

Jodie Foster in The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

Cult coming-of-age novels are notoriously difficult to translate for the screen; if they don't founder in development hell they tend to arrive with radical tonal shifts as, for example, Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries, sanitized as a suitable vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio. Gen-Y favorite The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, however, should hit theater screens next year with an added bonus to offset potential purists' complaints about the excision of some of the novel's grimmer twists – most notably, sequences animating the comic book that drives the plot designed by Spawn-creator Todd McFarlane. (Spawn's now the best selling comic in the U.S.) Produced by Jodie Foster's Egg Pictures, the film also gets added credibility from director Peter Care, who helmed R.E.M.'s 1996 Road Movie.

A southern gothic set in Savannah, Georgia in 1974, Altar Boys centers around the efforts of the thirteen-year-old Catholic school boys of the title to retrieve an obscene comic book they've drawn in which priests and nuns cavort in ways the Comics Code Authority would never approve. With the comic in the hands of school authorities – including Foster as an outraged nun and Vincent D'Onofrio as resident soccer coach – the boys, facing dire punishment, plot their revenge.

Though some of the novel's darker elements, like a misguided prank that leads to the death of the altar boys' ringleader, won't make it to the screen, the concept – adolescent boys as band of brothers finding in each other an affirmation their families can't provide – translates intact. In fact, Altar Boys is certain to be compared to Stand By Me, Rob Reiner's adaptation of the Stephen King novella.

Altar Boys' cult reputation has more than a little to do with the fact that its young author, Chris Fuhrman, succumbed to cancer shortly after completing the book in 1991; like John Kennedy O'Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, it's a much-praised volume by a writer of great promise whose career was cut short just as it was getting started. Especially chilling is a coda in which the story's narrator, now fifteen years older, describes moving on to art school and turning the book into an underground comic about a band of teenage anarchists led by a skeleton with a halo: "A boy who died and rose from the dead to remake the world the way he thought it ought to be."

The film's teen stars include Kieran Culkin and Jena Malone. Shot in Savannah and North Carolina early this summer after Foster opted out of the Silence of the Lambs sequel, Altar Boys should make it to theaters some time in 2001. (Although the film hasn't yet been linked to a specific distributor, Paramount would be a good bet since Foster moved her Egg nest there several years back.)

A paperback of The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is forthcoming in September from The University of Georgia Press (uga.edu/ugapress).

Also check out spawn.com for Todd McFarlane projects, past and present, and remhq.com for info on Road Movie and R.E.M.